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Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society
History's Worst F*ckboys: Lord Byron
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- [00:00]
Kate Lister
Hi, I'm your host, Kate Lister. If you would like betwixt the sheets ad free and get early access, sign up to History Hit with a History Hit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of original documentaries with top history presenters and enjoy a new release every single week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe.
- [00:27]
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- [02:02]
Kate Lister
Hello my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. I am me, you are you. And thankfully you are listening to Betwixt the Sheets. But before you can keep listening, I do have to tell you this is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects. And you should be an adult too. And if that doesn't make you feel safer and snuglier and far less triggered, I don't know what will, quite frankly. Right on with the show. They name thee before me. A knell to mine ear, A shudder comes o'er me. Why wert thou so dear? They know not I knew thee, who knew thee too well. Long, long shall I Rue thee too deeply to tell. In secret we met in silence. I grieve that thy heart could forget, thy spirit deceive. If I should meet thee after long years, how should I greet thee? With silence and tears. Huh. Well, that was Lord Byron, the man himself, the famous romantic rogue, the heartbreaking chaos goblin who is always falling in and out of love and then bitching about it. This is a man who certainly has a reputation and his own word in the dictionary to describe his moody sex appeal. Byronic. But is it fair to call him a fuckboy?
- [03:32]
Ryan Reynolds
What do you look for in a man?
- [03:34]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.
- [03:38]
Kate Lister
I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing a button. Now, emo. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.
- [03:53]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
Goodness.
- [03:53]
Kate Lister
What beautiful diamonds. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Dearing. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. Fuck boy. The word has only been around for 20 or so years, but the behavior has been about for far, far longer. So we're checking the receipts of some of the most famous and powerful men in history, trying to assess just how fuckboy y their behavior really was. First up, we have possibly the grand high priest of fuckboys and the man that I'm fairly sure would have won me over, Lord George Byron. A poet, a lord and a big old romantic slag. And we are going to find out more about the man and his life and definitely some, but probably not all because we just don't have time of his romantic partners. I want to find out why are we so intrigued by Byron's sex life? Why is it that important to his person and his work and whether or not the behavior was that unusual for the time. To tell us more about Byron, we have got none other than Professor Andrew Stauffer, president of the Byron Society of America, no less, and author of a life in 10 letters. So if anybody is going to be able to talk to us about Byron, it's him. Let's do it. Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Andrew Stouffer. How are you doing?
- [05:26]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
I'm doing well. Happy to be here.
- [05:28]
Kate Lister
I'm so glad you are here because this is an episode for our little miniseries on quote unquote, historical Fuckboys, which is very anachronistic, historically anachronistic. But we are looking at Byron and you are the person to talk to about Byron.
- [05:47]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
I'm ready. I'm ready. Yes, Lots to talk about. I made a list of some of his most important lovers and it's like 12 or 14 or 20 people long. And that's just the ones I could think of.
- [05:56]
Kate Lister
So, you know, I thought we should define terms, being proper academics and according to urbandictionary.com so obviously peer reviewed and very serious. A fuckboy is defined as a guy who lies to girls so he can pull as much as possible. He thinks he is God's gift to earth and is pretty damn beautiful. He will lie to you about planning a future and then when he starts to get too serious, he will ghost you fuck boys. Invented ghosting.
- [06:25]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
That's funny. Well, part of that applies. I'm not sure all of it. I'm not sure how often he deceived women. He definitely was unreliable, but I think most of them sort of knew what they were getting into beforehand. Except maybe the. Paradoxically, the woman he married who thought she could fix him and to whom he did make promises. But, you know, a lot of the others were different kinds of things and we can talk about that. But he was handsome. He was handsome. He was, you know, an object of desire by many people, particularly after he came, became famous. So he made the most of that.
- [07:00]
Kate Lister
He's got that. It's called the Byronic hero, isn't it? Like the moody, super intelligent, very emotional, very attractive, slightly dangerous. Am I gonna drop that quote already? Yes, I am. Mad, bad, dangerous to know. You must be so sick of that as a Byron scholar.
- [07:18]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
That's become his slogan somehow, you know. But yes, all of that, all of that. Partly an effect of the characters he was creating in his poetry that were like that, as you just described. And then partly that got confused with his real personality, the way celebrities do now. Is Taylor Swift the subject of her own song, you know, Is Billie Eilish the same person in person? You know, so there is that kind of conflation in the celebrity world between the art and the life.
- [07:43]
Kate Lister
So we should take this back to where Byron even came from, his origin story, because that's suitably romantic and Byronic as well, isn't it? It's like a high romantic tale all of itself.
- [07:57]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
Yes. I mean, he was born not knowing he was going to be Lord Byron and he was born with a deformed foot and his father left him soon after the birth. So he was raised mostly by a single mother in relative lack of opulence, let's say, compared to later in his life, raised in Scotland. And so he's brought up not really expecting to rise to the heights of society that he did, and particularly not to rise to the fame that he did as a poet. So he sort of begins not as a figure of ultimate privilege, but he ascends to that position later.
- [08:31]
Kate Lister
When does he start developing an interest in writing and poetry? Is that something that he always did? Is that something that he came into his own at university? When did he start doing that?
- [08:41]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
He ascends to the title of Lord Byron at age 10. And after that he moves from Scotland to Newstead Abbey and begins writing love poetry for the local bells and some poems about his own sense of himself as a newly risen or newly anointed lord.
- [08:57]
Kate Lister
At the age of 10?
- [08:58]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
Yes, at the age of 10. And as round he's hitting puberty, that he begins to write poems partly as amatory exercises, partly as translations from school, as you say. And it goes from there. He publishes his first book in his teens and it's mostly these sort of occasional love poems and school exercises, some of which are deemed too hot to handle for the local community. He has to recall the first book and excise some of the more sexy bits and then publish it a more chaste volume later.
- [09:25]
Kate Lister
Look, there we go first, red flag. Red flag number one. What do you think it was that set him apart from the other people writing at the time? Because there were a lot of people writing at this time. There was a lot of people writing complete rubbish. So why, what was? That's true. Some fabulous writers, but also some not so fabulous writers. What set him apart?
- [09:46]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
Yeah, the poem that made him famous suddenly was Childe Harold's Pilgrimage was a bit of a travelogue, a long poem about his travels in the near east, in Greece and Ottoman Turkey. And it was mixed with this Byronic Persona that you've talked about, the kind of dark, jaded, haunted wanderer with a past that he can't seem to escape, but nevertheless is bringing himself to these new scenes of historical scenes and new scenes of natural beauty and kind of reacting to them. And that poem just hit Regency London like a bomb for some reason. We read it now, and it's hard to see the exact appeal right away, but it instantly created this Persona. And I actually have this theory that wasn't just that, but the end of that long poem. In the same volume, he published a lot of these short love poems about his recent romantic experiences. And even if people never made it all the way through that long travel poem, which had some great parts, they could read the lyrics at the end, which some of them were written for men. Although they were written under a veil, readers assumed they were for women. Some were about his passions, wandering through the landscape. And they felt more personal in that way. So it's that book that makes him famous. And then everyone becomes passionately interested. Who is this young, handsome lord with the dark past and the jaded appetites and who nevertheless seems to have a glowing heart somewhere inside him? We want to read more and more and more. And it kind of took off from there.
- [11:10]
Kate Lister
I read Childe Harold's Pilgrimage when I was a student and I knew about Byron, the legend, before I ever got there. And I remember doing exactly what you've just described. I read through it and I was like, really? It's good. I mean, like, you know, lots of European. But it wasn't what I thought it was gonna be.
- [11:28]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
Yes, yes.
- [11:29]
Kate Lister
I thought it was gonna be like this, like romp this, like Jim Morrison, rock star explicit. And it's just not that at all.
- [11:37]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
No, it's more of a way of perceiving and talking about the world that was the hot. It wasn't. The subject almost didn't matter. Although there was the exoticism of the sort of the Near Eastern landscapes in which a lot of people hadn't traveled by then. It was just the way he talked about his feelings and the way he perceived the world that really hit a nerve. And then he followed it up quickly with these sort of more romantic pot boiler tales like the Corsair and the Giaour and the Bride of Abydos, set in similar scenes but with dark romantic heroes. That really solidified the Byronic hero as a thing. And people gobbled those up very quickly, too.
- [12:13]
Kate Lister
I mean, they did, didn't they? They absolutely lost their minds. Women were throwing their bloomers at him from as soon as that thing hit the shelves. And didn't he say, I woke up and found out I was famous, or words to that effect?
- [12:26]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
Yes, I woke up and found myself famous. And he was sort of. He was a lord, but he was sort of outside the inner, inner circles of Regency high life. Until that poem dropped. And then all the invitations were on his table. All the balls accessed, everyone. The Prince Regent, Holland House, the most glittering palaces of the Regency were open to him because of that poem. And it helped that he was a lord because then he could really mix in those circles as a. As an equal, have affairs with aristocratic women. You know, all of this. And that was his years of fame in London between about 1812 and 1815.
- [13:00]
Kate Lister
What was going on in his actual love Life at this time, because this poem drops and then we get a process of people forming a parasocial relationship with the man that they think he is. And then anyone that must have met him must have discovered pretty quick, oh, wow, he is quite. Or maybe he wasn't. What was going on in his personal life at this time?
- [13:22]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
Yeah, his love life is always complicated. It's hard to know even where to start. He had just returned from these travels. He had just returned from Athens, he had been there for about a year, where he was having love affairs with men, really, for the first time that we know for sure he was having sexual affairs with men in Greece.
- [13:40]
Kate Lister
How do we know this?
- [13:41]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
It was really only discovered for sure in the 1960s or 70s when someone figured out what this coded language he was using. To his friend Charles Skinner Matthews, who was a kind of an almost an uncloseted gay man at Cambridge that he knew, or at least the two of them talked a lot about young boys and the attraction of hyacinths, as they called them. And some of the letters he sent home to his Cambridge friends confessed that he had had sex. You know, he said it so many times with this man that I'm almost tired of it, which is something I would never thought would happen. That was Nicolo Gerard, who was a young teenager. I mean, Byron wasn't much more than a teenager himself, but that he had met while in Athens. And so a couple affairs that we know about there, actual sexual affairs that then fed into the sense of concealment, darkness, passion, appetite, that was fueling the Child Herald volume. Right. So homosexuality is a capital crime in Britain at this time. It can't be talked about, it can't be discussed. Although it was sort of an open secret in a sense, that at the public schools. Byron at Harrow, for example, had his Theban band of young male admirers, a reference to the pairs of lovers, you know, the pairs of Theban lovers that fought, that were the jewel in the crown of the Theban army, finally defeated by Philip at Karenia. But they were explicitly an older beloved and a younger beloved. And the reason they fought so well is because they wanted to protect each other, they loved each other so much. That was the Greek precedent. So Byron had a group that he. A cadre at Ero that he called that. And it seems clear that he had some sexual relationships with men at Harrow and probably at Cambridge, but a lot of it, as you say, we don't really know until he gets to Greece, and then it becomes more acceptable over there. And it makes its way into his letters.
- [15:24]
Kate Lister
Did he ever have what we might call a boyfriend? Was his experiences with men all kind of fleeting encounters or was there anything more long term?
- [15:32]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
Well, you know, at Cambridge he falls sort of in love with this boy, John Eddleston, who he hears him singing in the choir at Trinity and he falls in love with his voice first. And he writes a number of love plays, poems for John, and they exchange rings with little Cornelian jewels in them. And Byron writes a lot of poems for John and he parts with him in great sorrow when John leaves to go to London to work as a clerk. And he says, my heart is a chaos of hope and sorrow. He's gone. So there's this real passionate rhetoric around Eddleston that sounds like the way you would talk about a boyfriend or a girlfriend. But he always insisted that it was a pure love. Not sure exactly what that means, but it seems clear it was heavily vibrating with sexual attraction. And then Nicolo in Athens, who about. We don't know that. We don't know that much, but Byron at the time wrote a will leaving him £7,000, which he later canceled, but that's a lot of money back in 1809, you know, and the fact that they had had sex for, you know, eight, nine months together, that's, you know, kind of relationship. Again, we don't know much about the passions of it, but.
- [16:36]
Kate Lister
So he might not be in our definition or Urban Dictionary's definition of a fuckboy. Like the idea that he didn't care about the people that he was having sex with. That doesn't seem to fit Byron.
- [16:49]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
It's hard to say. I mean, certainly when he's in Venice. So after his marriage is over and he moves to Venice for a period of utter debauchery and promiscuity where he brags of the hundreds of women that he's bedded. That period seems to be pretty transactional in the sense that he is often giving gifts or, you know, having assignations. But he's plow through the Venetian population with some dispatch and he doesn't seem to care about many of them that much. He does have a few long term mistresses, Margarita Cogni and Mariana Sagatti, who do stick around even as they admit he's having sex with other people. They claim the position of primary mistress. Some of them move into the house for a while, keep him organized, kind of take care of things, fight with the others who are trying to get his attention. And so, you know, I don't know, it runs the gamut, I guess. Everything from those casual encounters to the heartfelt relationships with the young men at Harrow, to someone like Claire Claremont, who he impregnates. You know, Mary Shelley's stepsister being impregnates just before leaving London and she pursues him to Geneva for that famous haunted summer when they're all together in the villa writing and Mary's writing Frankenstein. Clare is there trying to get Byron to love her. He has no interest. He was happy to. You know, he said, if an 18 year old girl travels 1000 miles to unphilosophized me, what can I do? I let her have her way. But I never pretended to care about the girl that ultimately broke Claire's heart.
- [18:17]
Kate Lister
The worst thing is, is I can totally see that I would have shagged Byron. I would have been that girl following him around going, if I just love him hard enough, he'll love me back.
- [18:27]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
Yes, I can make him love me. Right. That was the mistake. Anyone who thought they could change him, that was when it was trouble.
- [18:33]
Kate Lister
What on earth was going on in that setup? I mean, I've jumped ahead a little bit now, but that setup with Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Mary's sister. Percy's married to somebody else back home who's already pregnant and he's decided to elope with two sisters through a war zone. Byron turns up. What on earth is going on there?
- [18:52]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
I mean, you really summed it up there. What a scene of chaos in a way, Yeah.
- [18:57]
Kate Lister
I mean, everyone's pregnant.
- [18:59]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
Everyone's pregnant. There seems to be a lot of that. Mary by that time has already lost one child and has another. The women are all in their teens and Claire is pregnant. They come at it from different reasons. The Shelley party, that is. Mary, Percy and Claire do seem to have a philosophical backing behind this devotion to free love and what we now would call polyamory. They actually believe that this is the way humans were meant to love. Not selfishly or possessively or monogamously, but more open. And so they took sort of positive steps to try to create the world that they wanted to live in. And it was almost ethical in their mind that you lived this way with other people. Byron is coming off this ruined marriage that he himself basically ruined. A complicated affair with his half sister. His longing for boys or young men, that has not been sated for a time. And now he's cut loose in Europe and Claire has thrown herself at him. And so he's sort of kind of dragged into the dynamic of that. He actually says that when he was in Geneva. He lived a very moral life that he didn't do that much. I think maybe Clare came up to the villa a few nights, but he ultimately tried to keep her away. It wasn't like a free flown orgy every night or anything like that, but it was a complicated set of sexual dynamics exactly because of everything you laid out there.
- [20:20]
Kate Lister
I'll be back with Andrew and Lord Byron after the break.
- [20:39]
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- [22:39]
Kate Lister
So let's take it back. Before he even ends up in this Jerry Springer nightmare in Europe, we should talk about Lady Caroline Lamb, one of his most famous lovers who deserves an episode all of her own, to be completely honest, because Complex doesn't begin to capture that woman. How did they meet and what was their relationship like?
- [23:00]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
Yes, I mean, she's married at the time to William Lamb and, you know, sort of hanging around Holland House, which is one of the great glittering social centers and political powerhouses of the Whig party. And so Byron is drawn to that world. And Carol, that's sort of her nickname initially. She sees all the women throwing themselves at him and is like, I am not going to be one of those ladies. But the minute she does meet him, she's drawn in. She goes home that night and writes in her diary, that pale, beautiful face is my fate. And there's a sense that she's very passionate. Byron called her his little volcano. She struggled with mental illness later in her life, and she may have already had a hint of that. He also called her little mania. And there's a sense that once she set her cap at him, it was two combustible things coming together.
- [23:45]
Jonathan Fields
And.
- [23:46]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
And so, yeah, the affair begins. She is not discreet at all about it. No, the husband is very understanding.
- [23:54]
Kate Lister
Understanding, yeah.
- [23:55]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
Yes. And keeps taking her back. She is increasingly embarrassing.
- [23:59]
Kate Lister
She sends him a pubic hair, right?
- [24:01]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
She sends him pubic hair. She wants some back in the mail. You know, she'll sneak into his room dressed as a page, as if she had a message, and then, you know, takes everything off. And that. Actually, Byron loved all that, particularly the cross dressing. Caroline was sort of boyish with short hair, her sort of a flapper style, and she would cross dress at times. And I think Byron, this was really hitting all of Byron's buttons because she was partly masculine, partly feminine, partly crazy, partly obsessed with him, you know, and beautiful and intelligent and a writer in her own right and a representation of the absolute inner circle, the highest levels of the aristocratic social scene. And so in some sense, she might have felt like a prize to the shy, overweight boy from Aberdeen with a deformed leg who suddenly found himself catapulted into this world.
- [24:51]
Kate Lister
She does rather lose it. Despite her starting. And by saying that I'm not gonna throw myself at him, she does end up veering into what could be termed as needing a restraining order. Like, doesn't she? Like she wrote to his publishers pretending to be him to get a portrait of him. And that she breaks into his house and leaves him for him to like. Wow.
- [25:15]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
Yes. And when she hears that he's engaged to Annabella, she says she's gonna go buy pistols and show up at his door and kill herself in front of him.
- [25:22]
Kate Lister
There we go.
- [25:22]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
So it's that kind of thing. And he Eventually, Byron, he's one of those people who always claims he hates drama, but he always is creating drama. Eventually it even becomes too much for him, who was, in a sense, a drama king, drama queen, whatever he was even. He eventually finds it. For a while, it's intoxicating and he's sort of drawn into it and the kind of push, pull and obviously the kind of incredible sexual energy between them. But then eventually, yeah, it goes too far and he's like, I basically need a restraining order. I need to get away from this woman. And that's partly why he gets married and partly because of the affair with Augusta, his half sister, which is going on simultaneously. And he's like, I really have to stop that. That's bad.
- [26:01]
Kate Lister
Of all the things I'm doing, that's the.
- [26:03]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
All the things I'm doing. I need to put this whole life aside and marry a nice woman who's going to be good for me. And you know how that goes.
- [26:10]
Kate Lister
So he definitely was having sex with his half sister because there's always some people that go, well, we can't be quite sure.
- [26:18]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
Yeah, I mean, you know, I hate. I hesitate to say definitely about anything with sex in history, because you often don't know. I think you can say that the relationship was more erotic and intimate than you would expect for half siblings.
- [26:32]
Kate Lister
Yeah.
- [26:33]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
What exact form that took, do we know? I don't know, but it definitely, you know, people commented on the time. It seems to have been a sort of open secret that Byron is sort of bringing her around as. Not as a sister, but as a kind of love interest. And, you know, the vibes were off. I think when people saw them together, the vibes were off for a brother, sister relation. And if you look at their letters, and certainly Lady Byron's, his wife's testimony, she's like, they were on the couch, you know, canoodling. I would go upstairs to bed and they would be whispering and giggling and, you know, doing all this stuff. And she was pretty sure that that was what was happening.
- [27:09]
Kate Lister
We should probably talk about the woman that he married who genuinely doesn't seem to have quite known what she was getting herself into and was an odd. Seemed like an odd choice for somebody like Byron. Can you tell us a bit about who she was and how they ended up together?
- [27:25]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
She was well born, appropriate for him as a member of the class to which he belonged. She was serious, moral, a mathematician, ultimately someone who Byron thought could reform him. They had a series of letters exchanged where he would sort of talk about his Bad past. And she would say, all you need to do is try a little, you know, let me help. And so I think he turned to her as a kind of rescuer from a world that had become too chaotic, thanks to himself. And she thought she could fix him. She took it on as a duty, I think, to say just if one woman would love him steadily, he could come out of this. And finally he proposes to her, and she turns him down. She says, I don't know you well enough yet. I'm not sure about this. And then she goes off and she reads Pride and Prejudice, and she loves the Darcy character so much, and she actually writes about this that then he comes back and says, I'm still thinking about you. Is there any objection that is insurmountable between our union? And at that point, she has sort of talked herself into. She's missed him. She's missed the energy and the kind of confusion and the passion. And when he proposes again, she says.
- [28:38]
Kate Lister
Yes, I swear, that book has been responsible for so many bad decisions, like from when she first wrote it to Colin Firth and his wet shirt through to the Keira Knightley version. The amount of women I know, just watch it for that scene where he just flexes his hand slightly as he takes just. And to know that poor old Annabella back in the day read it and then went, maybe I can change him, too.
- [29:05]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
Exactly. So Byron isn't solely to blame for all of this. Blame Jane Austen for some of the.
- [29:09]
Kate Lister
Bad things that ended up happening.
- [29:11]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
Right. She is the real seducer here.
- [29:13]
Kate Lister
That is a hot literary take I like. You could write a whole article about that.
- [29:20]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
So, yeah, their marriage was awkward almost from the beginning. They never were quite comfortable around each other. Although apparently the sex was good, as far as we can tell. The things that they say in the letters and the way they both talk. There was a physical passion between them that worked out quite well. But like with volatile people, you know, the first night of their wedding night, Byron wakes up and he's in one of those beds with red curtains all around, and the light of the fire is in the distance. And he wakes up and says, good God, surely I'm in hell. You know? And that sort of sets the tone for the honeymoon, which oscillates between these moments of true. Almost terror on his part and rage and then moments of intimacy and almost tenderness. It would almost be easier to understand their relationship if it was monsters from the beginning. But it kept her guessing, because you never knew which Byron was gonna walk in the room. The one that was tender and gentle or the one who was gonna be ferocious and half insane.
- [30:14]
Kate Lister
Why do they end up separating? She says, as if, like, it's not pretty. We haven't paved the way for this already, right?
- [30:20]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
She gets pregnant almost immediately. There's something in the water. They're all getting pregnant all the time, but. But they're only married for about a year. As Ada, the baby approaches, he seems to get more. He's drinking more, he's carousing with actresses at Drury Lane. He's descending into a kind of paranoia. He becomes violent and abusive. It's not clear whether he hit her, but he definitely is throwing things at the wall and cursing and saying, they've ruined each other, all this stuff. So eventually the servants have to keep them apart. And she gives birth in the house while he's throwing empty soda bottles against the ceiling. And in one of his rages, convinced he's insane. And she leaves with the baby to go back to her father's house. Initially just to get some distance and to kind of figure out what's going on. But as soon as she tells her father and her relatives what's been going on in the house, they absolutely forbid her from going back. Worried about her safety and the child's safety, and it kind of devolves from there. And pretty soon he leaves England for good.
- [31:18]
Kate Lister
What she told them must have been quite severe for a family to say, don't go back to him. You're better off as a single mother in the early 1900s than dating this person. So presumably she told him about this weird relationship with the sister, probably that.
- [31:34]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
Probably there might have been physical abuse. There might have even been spousal rape. We don't know exactly, but there seems to have been at least threats of violence in the home. And then there is also, yeah, the sexual stuff that he seems compelled to confess to. He seems to have actually taunted Lady Byron with his affairs. Even while they're going on with the actresses. He would present her with lists of gifts he had given to the actresses that he was currently sleeping with. He's so self destructive that she was like, what are you supposed to do with this? They never got divorced. She just never went back to him. And then he leaves the country and that's the last time he sees her or his daughter.
- [32:10]
Kate Lister
Was there an accusation of sodomy? Have I muddled that up?
- [32:13]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
That's the other thing. Yeah. So then once this starts happening, Caroline Lamb gets back into the game because Caroline knew about the stuff in Grease with the Boys and his proclivities. And she had probably played that role for him, you know, as sort of being the cross dressed page boy kind of thing. And so she knew about Byron's bisexuality and she threatened to go public with that. Cause she was finally getting some of her own back. She felt Byron had treated her monstrously and now he'd married someone else and now she was a woman scorned and she was gonna spread those rumors. So that probably was a bigger reason why he left than the accusations of incest. I mean, incest, you know, half sister, half sibling incest in Regency London wasn't unique in Byron's case. Certainly cousins, you know, first cousins were marrying all the time. I don't know if that would have been quite enough if he hadn't been determined to publicize it, to parade her around, to confess to his wife, to, you know, all the other things that he seemed to want to. He almost wanted to bring the house down upon his own head.
- [33:15]
Kate Lister
It was the accusations that he'd been with men that had done it, right.
- [33:19]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
Because that's a capital crime at the time. He theoretically could have been prosecuted, even executed. He wouldn't have been, but there could have been homophobic violence in the streets. There could have been, you know, terrible things. So he just wanted to get out of there. And Europe was calling.
- [33:39]
Kate Lister
I'll be back with Andrew, Andrew and Lord Byron after the break.
- [33:58]
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- [35:13]
Kate Lister
Isn'T it funny that he builds this reputation, and in no small part as a very sexual reputation that he still has to this very day. And he courts it and he plays with it and he lives up to it, but all of a sudden that's also going to be the thing that brings him down. It's like he gets permission from the public to act up in certain ways, but then there's a line that gets crossed and now everybody is angry at this thing that they knew about, surely.
- [35:39]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
Right. And that they, in a certain way, cultivated, and they wanted him to be more. You know, it's this. It's the way we treat our celebrities. We want scandal and of course, we want them to be doing interesting things. And yet, you know, there's a certain point, you know, the tide of public opinion turns and, you know, it's not that he was canceled. I mean, people kept buying his poetry, but he was kind of branded then as darker than we had suspected. We thought it was just a character he was playing. We thought he was a Mr. Darcy who ultimately is redeemable, but perhaps he's even more satanic than that, more wicked, more irredeemable, more of a monster as opposed to just a dark romantic hero.
- [36:14]
Kate Lister
Sort of the same thing that happened to Oscar Wilde. It was always part of his Persona. But then suddenly, when it becomes real, that. Now, I can't remember who said it to Oscar Wilde. They said that it was the English, one of their periodic fits of morality, which I always quite liked.
- [36:29]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
Exactly, exactly. And for the Regency, particularly the Regency set in which Byron ran, it wasn't like morality, sexual morality was anything like what middle class morality is now. They were all sleeping with each other. Married women, married men. I mean, that was just standard. That adultery was not even an issue. But you were supposed to keep it quiet or at least keep it decorous or keep it surfaces preserved. And Byron wasn't good at that. Caroline Lamb wasn't good at that. That, you know, if he hadn't gotten married, he might have been able to sustain it. But he was on the verge of something with his half sister. He was talking about running off with her, you know, So I don't know. I don't know.
- [37:07]
Kate Lister
What on earth was the plan there? Like, you can't marry. What am I talking about, marry? No, he'd have just been in this little weird commune that he had going with Percy Bysshe, wouldn't they? All in together, right.
- [37:18]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
Similarly. Right. They just run off. They're Always running off somewhere. He was like, let's leave. Let's go, you know, go somewhere else.
- [37:23]
Kate Lister
So he's off to Europe and what's his plan now? Because he's not officially exiled, but sort of self exiled.
- [37:31]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
That's right. I think initially he thought maybe he would just go abroad for a while and let things die down, let it calm down, put some distance between his wife and her family, distance between a disapproving public, distance from Caroline Lamb, distance from all that, and just sort of rethink things. He was going to go to Italy right away, but then Claire convinces him to go to Switzerland because that's where the Shelleys will be and that's where she's going. And he does want to meet Percy and Mary, who are sort of Mary particularly, who's the Nepo baby celebrity of the day, the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and Percy, who he knew as a fledgling poet in his own right. And so that literary attraction and plus Clare's importunities got him to Geneva for a summer. And that's where, you know, all of that happened. And then he's off to Italy from there and he kind of gets addicted to Italy, or just falls in love with Venice. He falls in love with the Italians, becomes more Italian himself, and finds in their mode of life something much more congenial than the tight little island of England, as he calls it. There's something about the loose, passionate nature of the south and its cultural ways of being, its sexual ways of being, that appeals to him. And he pretty much stays there till the end, until he goes off to Greece.
- [38:41]
Kate Lister
And this is sort of where he enters, just. I don't know what you'd call it. His sexual escapades reach new heights once he's in Italy.
- [38:49]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
Yes, Venice is the place and carnival. And it seems clear that the Venetians. I mean, it's a very poor city at that time. It's an occupied city by the Austrians. And Byron comes with a lot of money and a lot of clout as a British lord. And, you know, it's not fair to call him a sex tourist in Venice, but it's also clear that most of those relationships had some sort of transactional element, or at least relied upon the mismatch between his incredible resources and the poverty of the locals, and even the aristocratic locals in Venice, who would have been sort of dazzled by him and by his presence. And it didn't hurt that he was reported to be handsome and already a legendary lover, and all of These things. So a figure of dark scandal. It's like, oh, I kind of want to meet this guy. And there's also a sense in Venice that he was in a deep depression and that what he's doing is a kind of hedonistic therapy or just escapism where he's just losing himself in orgies of various kinds, trying to forget everything that he's lost and all the self inflicted damage that he's. And not all self inflicted, some inflicted by others. He was. We didn't mention this, but he was sexually abused as a child by his nurse, May Gray, who would come to his bed and play tricks with my person, as he said, when he was about nine years old, in between teaching him about the scriptures and beating him if he couldn't remember the scripture verses. So he grew up with a very vexed attitude towards female sexuality from very early on. So that early abuse may have led to complexities of his sexual imagination later.
- [40:24]
Kate Lister
Was he writing when he was in Venice or was he just in full self destruct mode by this point?
- [40:29]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
He was, yeah. He's amazingly, you know, that's where he reinvents himself as a poet and he starts writing his masterpieces, particularly in the Otavo, Rima, Beppo and Don Juan. You know, he's the great poems that are gonna become the second act of his care. The more comic, the more capacious, the more epic, the more Italian poetry, as opposed to the kind of dark Byronic brooding tales and Childe Harold and things like that. Although he does continue to write Childe Harold in Italy as well. And Childe Harold Canto 4 is set largely in Rome and that's a beautiful piece of work too. But Italy gets into his DNA and into his DNA as a poet. And so he begins actually a great period of productivity. He's always productive. He writes a ton. Even in the middle of parties and dissipations. He stays up all night, he'll party till two in the morning, he comes home, he'll write till five, and then he'll sleep till noon or two the next day. And that was the schedule he liked to be on to write very late at night. After all the dissipation and partying was over.
- [41:30]
Kate Lister
Wow, okay. How does he end up in Greece? He has such a strange ending. Like you read through all this and you're like, well, he's obviously gonna die young. Of course he is. That has to be how this story's gonna finish. But how he dies and where he dies, it's so strange.
- [41:47]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
That he ends up there after all that Venetian stuff. He meets Teresa Guiccioli, who in some ways is the love of his life. The 19 year old Italian Countess. She's married to a 50 year old man and they begin an affair. And that affair lasts for four plus years. At which point I don't think we can prove that once he meets Teresa and begins that affair that he has sex with anybody else ever again. Which is, I mean it's not impossible. And there are little tantalizing hints here and there, but nothing definitive. Teresa, he says, this is my last attachment. I'm done with promiscuous concubinage. I'm ready for strictest adultery. Basically she separates, eventually separates from her husband. They develop a kind of domestic situation, both of them separated from their spouses until he leaves for Greece. And so people say, well, was he tired of Teresa or what was he looking for? I think partially he was looking for a next act of doing something, not just as a poet but as a public figure. He had given some speeches in the House of Lords, but they had not amount to much because his party was completely out of power. The conservatives were in charge, the Whigs. No matter what they said, no one paid attention. And he always had been attracted to causes of liberation. The underdog cause he had organized for the Italian nationalist movement in Italy, which had come to nothing. And then the Greek revolution breaks out, 1821. Shelley had been a huge supporter of the Greek, Greek revolution against the Ottomans.
- [43:09]
Kate Lister
He would be so.
- [43:10]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
Yeah, so Byron just sort of took over. After Shelley dies, Byron kind of takes on some of that spirit. And his friends back in England are pushing him to get involved with the Greek cause. And so he says, well, I'll go check it out, I'll see what I can do. And pretty soon he finds himself aboard a ship full of 60,000 silver dollars headed for Greece to help the cause. And it's there that he didn't know he only would have about 100 days in Masolonghi, where he went before fever carried him off. But he ends up with almost a hero's ending, despite himself because of that final gesture, which was sincere. I think he was going there not just to a showboat, he dug in. He could have left at any time. He worked on humanitarian causes, he tried to organize the troops, he tried to figure out who was in charge in Greece because it was a lot of infighting among the local leaders. And before he could accomplish too much, he died. But his death brought eyes of the world to that region and Pretty soon thereafter, Greece did win its independence.
- [44:10]
Kate Lister
And he's still regarded as a hero in Greece.
- [44:13]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
Absolutely. Yeah. A lot of Byron streets and Byron cafes. And the name Byron is used for young men in Greece. So, yeah, he's a national hero there for sure.
- [44:22]
Kate Lister
So, as a final question then, I once saw an interview with Alice Cooper who said that the reason he's been able to be as successful for as long as he is in the music industry in the rock and roll world is because he learned long ago that you can't live like Alice Cooper. You can be. Alice Cooper is a stage Persona, and that's where he belongs. If you try and live like Alice, you are gonna crash and burn. And he said, and I've seen that happen so many times. I wonder, how could we apply that to Byron? Do you think that this public Persona he had, he was trying to live up to it and it fed into him? Or do you think that really was who he was?
- [44:59]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
You know, I think a lot of times he's fighting against that darkness that's threatening to overtake him. He seems to have been manic depressive in a way, and that a lot of that dark stuff is bubbling in him. And he's trying to control it with art or with different kinds of behavior. He oscillates between this libertinage and then kind of hermetic withdrawal where he just is ascetic. He won't eat anything, he doesn't drink. So I think it's a struggle for him to contain or to control the dark side. And he is sometimes successful, sometimes not. Poetry is what saved him. He said that poetry was sort of the lava of the imagination that prevents the eruption, the overflow. You could sort of let it out instead of exploding. And he also said, you know, how could anyone live a life of passion? Like, my characters are always passionate. You can't live like that. How would I shave myself in such a state and just sort of making light of it? But there's a sense that, you know, he recognized that a life of passion is a life of pain. And a lot of his late poems are sort of like, let my heart calm. Let me be less moved. Let me be still. And that kind of plea for internal calm that he cannot always access. It sounds to me like someone who is struggling to not be the rock star Alice Cooper that keeps coming out that dark, satanic side that we partially admire and partially fear.
- [46:17]
Kate Lister
Andrew, you have been wonderful to talk to. You have been fabulous in helping us understand the slightly fuckboy elements of Byron. Very complex.
- [46:28]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
We've only touched the surface too. I feel like there's probably about three more hours. We really need to get into details of all of these. You know, there's all these lovers we haven't even mentioned. But yeah, those are some of the main points. If you want more, you can read my book, please.
- [46:40]
Kate Lister
I was just about to say, if people want to know more about you, where can they find you? Give us the full title of your book and any social media handles you've got.
- [46:48]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
Yeah, there's a biography I wrote. It came out last year. It's called a Life in 10 Letters, published by Cambridge University Press. It'll come out in paperback in September, so we could watch for that. But it goes through 10 of Byron's periods of his life, keyed to a particular great letter that he wrote to a different correspondent, lovers, friends and all of that. So it's got that confessional side, but then also the story that goes behind that letter, what all went into that. So I hope people will pick that up. I'm a professor of English at the University of Virginia. I teach in the English department there and I study 19th century British lit, so easily found online.
- [47:22]
Kate Lister
Thank you so much for talking to me today. I've thoroughly enjoyed myself.
- [47:26]
Professor Andrew Stauffer
It's great to talk with you, Kate. Thanks for having me.
- [47:34]
Kate Lister
Thank you so much for listening to Betwixt the Sheets and thank you to Andrew for joining me. Come back next week for another possible fuckboy. The Emperor Caligula. Did he really make his horse a senator? Did he really have sex with. With his sisters? He was a lot of things, but can we comfortably call him a boy? Perhaps just a. Well, we will be here with all the answers. If you like what you heard, please don't forget to like, review and follow along whatever it is that you get. Your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us@betwixt historyhit.com this podcast was edited by Tom Delaghi and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Charlotte La. Join me again Betwixt the Sheets, the history of Sex scandal in society, a podcast by History hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.
- [48:29]
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- [49:10]
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